Decarbonization of Distribution Transformers Based on Current Reduction: Economic and Environmental Impacts

Well-known industrial practice efficiency improvement techniques, such as reactive compensation, load balancing, and harmonic filtering, are used in this paper to reduce energy losses in distribution transformers, and therefore, to decrease carbon dioxide emissions and economic costs in the operation of these transformers. Load balancing is carried out by monitoring the values of the angles of the active and reactive components of the vector unbalanced power. Likewise, the application of Order 3/2020 of the Spanish National Markets and Competition Commission is described, in detail, for the calculation of the economic costs derived from the transformer energy losses caused by the load currents and the penalties due to transformer energy deliveries with capacitive power factors. Finally, all these improvement techniques are applied to determine savings in carbon dioxide emissions and costs on the electricity bill of an actual 1000 kVA distribution transformer that supplies a commercial and night-entertainment area. The results of this application case reveal that cost reductions due to energy loss savings are modest, but the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and the savings in penalties for capacitive reactive supplies are significant